Wednesday, September 30, 2015

The Harper government hopes that concluding the TPP deal will be its October Surprise. Constitutional convention dictates that, in an election campaign, the sitting government becomes a caretaker government. But this government is contemptuous of all constitutional conventions. Scott Sinclair writes:

This would not be the first time this government has run roughshod over
constitutional convention. Prorogation of Parliament, contempt of
Parliament, misleading Parliament, omnibus budget bills … the list of
abuses is long.

But, more importantly, an election campaign is no place to consider the trade deal. Even if Barack Obama gets the version of the trade deal he wants, Congress will have to put it under the microscope:

Even if an agreement is hammered out in Atlanta, the president must give
Congress 90 days’ notice before signing anything, and that only starts
the legislative clock ticking. Congressional consideration would extend
well into 2016, making the TPP a political football during the U.S.
elections.

Which means that nothing is going to happen until well after the election is over. And there are a lot of things we should be concerned about in the proposed treaty:

At the last meeting, the U.S. secretly cut a
side deal with Japan to allow Japanese and other automakers to sell cars
and parts with high levels of Chinese content duty free in North
America, undercutting the Canadian and Mexican industries. Economist Jim
Stanford estimates this could cost the Canadian auto sector 24,600
jobs.

With energy and commodity prices in the
gutter, many Canadians understand it is not a good time to be
sacrificing well-paying jobs or weakening struggling manufacturers that
are the main hope for reviving our stagnant economy.

These high-profile issues are just the tip of
the iceberg. The TPP could mean major changes in matters ranging from
access to medicines to the weakening of privacy protections.
Unfortunately, there is no way these and other potential surprises
buried in the massive text would be properly aired in the closing days
of the campaign.

The Harperites, however, will not take any of these concerns into consideration. Another reason they must be tossed from office on October 19th.

Tuesday, September 29, 2015

Pierre Trudeau's ghost haunted Roy Thomson Hall last night. Stephen Harper has been doing battle with that ghost since he entered public life. And, last night, Tom Mulcair tried to call it from the grave. Michael Harris writes:

Several times during this entertainment, Mulcair linked Bill C-51 to the
invocation of the War Measures Act. As Tommy Douglas had stood against
the War Measures Act in 1970, Mulcair’s NDP was now standing up against
Bill C-51 — unlike Justin Trudeau, he insisted.

The Liberal leader stole Harper’s family values turf by standing up for
his famous father, who died exactly 15 years ago yesterday. Justin
defended Pierre Trudeau from the attacks of the two other leaders with
whom he shared the stage. He talked about his pride in being the son of
such a man as Canada’s most famous prime minister — a stark contrast to
the image of Pierre Trudeau offered by NDP leader Thomas Mulcair. “Fifteen years ago tonight he passed away," Justin reminded his audience, "and he wouldn’t want us fighting battles of the past.”

Even committed Harperite Tasha Kheiriddin admitted that Trudeau won the night:

But even if you disagree vehemently with his positions, you couldn’t
deny that he delivered them with conviction. Throughout the night, he
clearly articulated Liberal policies, defended them passionately, threw
in some good zingers (describing Stephen Harper’s northern strategy as
“all sled, no dogs”) and, most importantly, didn’t trip up. And so,
Trudeau won last night’s debate.

Perhaps, Harris suggests, that's because Trudeau -- who was supposed to be not ready for prime time -- is a better politician than either Harper or Mulcair:

It started with the arrival of his bus at the place Toronto’s mucky
mucks gather to celebrate culture. While both the other leaders pulled
up at the main entrance and quickly disappeared inside, Trudeau’s bus
stopped 50 meters from the venerable front doors.

A cavalcade of acolytes poured out, Justin following closely behind.
It had the feel of a heavyweight boxer making his way to the ring for
the main event minus the hoodie and the shadow boxing. Sort of like Mick
Jagger taking to the stage at the El Mocambo in another era. A rock
star in the age of the rock star.

Trudeau waded into the crowd of supporters standing behind the ropes on
the sidewalk with that big bear embrace that excites royal
photographers. The money shot. The guy with the royal jelly embracing
the great unwashed. Democracy.

Monday, September 28, 2015

At tonight's Munk debate, Stephen Harper will claim that -- just as he is a master of economic policy -- he is also a foreign policy guru. But, Michael Harris writes, Harper's foreign policy is all about milking the world for money while being guided by humanity's darker angels:

Behind the emotional appeal to the worst angels of our nature and fear
mongering is a decade’s worth of diplomatic disaster. The world has
become a much more dangerous place for Canadians due almost solely
to the Harper approach, and Canada has been involved in some of the
darkest episodes post 9/11 – including a dubious role in Afghanistan
that might yet spark a public inquiry into allegations of war crimes.

Harper's betrayal of Canada's traditional role in the world is breathtaking:

Consider some of the breathless reversals of Canadian foreign policy
under Harper: While even China announces a cap-and-trade policy to
reduce carbon emissions in the name of planetary salvation, Harper was
the first world leader to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol.

He also refused to honour Canada’s commitments at Copenhagen to
reduce carbon emissions. To be sure it wouldn’t come back on his watch,
he then dismantled the entire climate change branch within Foreign
Affairs and has yet to regulate the energy industry.

Under Harper, and without informing either Parliament or the United
Nations, Canada withdrew from the UN convention to fight drought in
Africa and other vulnerable countries, making Canada the only state to
do so out of 193 that signed on to the convention. The rest of the world
saw encroaching deserts as an urgent problem because they are so
obviously tied to famine and poverty. Then foreign minister John Baird
referred to the convention as a fruitless “talkfest.”

For Harper, foreign policy must -- first and foremost -- generate profits:

After a brief flirtation with moralizing against evil-doers, Harper now
routinely does deals with the devil. Despite its human rights record,
Harper has cut huge deals with China, including Sinopec, the giant
Chinese petroleum and chemical company. That $4.6 billion deal for 9
percent of Syncrude was eclipsed by the sale of Calgary-based resource
company Nexen to the China National Offshore Oil Corporation. The
price-tag was $15 billion but the conditions could prove much steeper –
Canadian sovereignty. That’s because Harper granted China the right to
sue Canada for unlimited damages if domestic laws by any level of
government in this country harmed the value of Chinese investment here.

Once upon a time, Harper said this: “I don’t think Canadians want us to
sell out important Canadian values. They don’t want us to sell that out
to the almighty dollar.” If you are wondering what happened to the man
that spoke those words, he has undergone a sea-change. The new Harper
now sells out Canadian values without so much as a blink.

How else can it be explained that Canada just sold $15 billion worth of
weapons to Saudi Arabia, a country recently described by The Atlantic as
a world champion of human rights abuse? This is a country that plans to
behead and then crucify 21 year-old Ali al-Nimr for protesting against
the state during the Arab Spring when he was a teenager. But I thought
the beheaders were the bad guys? Now it turns out ISIS is something
quite different: Saudi Arabians without money.

Harper knows nothing about economics or foreign policy. But what's worse, he thinks they're one and the same thing.

Sunday, September 27, 2015

It's not easy to tell the truth -- particularly when people don't want to hear it. Linda McQuaig caused something of a political firestorm awhile back for suggesting that -- if we're really serious about climate change -- most of the black goo in northern Alberta will have to stay in the ground. Yonatan Strauch and Thomas Homer-Dixon write that the numbers back up McQuaig:

The math says that having a safe climate
requires leaving huge oil reserves in the ground. To avert warming so
catastrophic we can’t adapt to it – generally thought to be about 2
degrees C above pre-industrial temperatures – the atmosphere can absorb
only so much carbon.

This is known as the global carbon budget. According to the International Energy Agency’s
450 scenario, staying within this budget requires more than half of
fossil fuel reserves to remain unburned. Most importantly for Canada,
even with sharp limits on coal emissions world oil consumption soon
peaks below 100 million barrels per day – not far above current levels
of consumption – and then declines to around 80 mb/d in 2035.
Stephen Harper has bet the Canadian economy on the oil sands. But, even as he was placing that bet, the action at the tables was changing.

Consider what has happened to coal:

Ten years ago, coal was a solid investment. Consumption was growing
fast; meanwhile, solar and wind power were relatively expensive. Today,
investment banks like Citigroup and HSBC warn the coal industry is in
permanent decline, while noting that renewables are increasingly
competitive. Of course, in the U.S. cheap natural gas from fracking has
played a big part in coal’s shifting fortunes. But the rapidly falling
cost of renewables has been important too.

The same fate could await oil:

What’s happening to coal could easily happen to oil. Global demand could
soften far sooner than currently seems possible, thanks to a
combination of carbon policy, increased vehicle and infrastructure
efficiency, and electric vehicle growth driven by plummeting battery
costs. This is an energy innovation scenario we should be betting on,
not against.

But Harper -- and Canadians in general -- won't talk about what's happening. They refuse to look at the math:

It’s no wonder many Canadians don’t want to
discuss these hard numbers. For Canada to become a fossil-fuel “energy
superpower” the world has to blow its carbon budget. The price of oil
has to stay above $80 a barrel long enough to justify long-term
investments in oilsands infrastructure. A modest carbon tax could buy us
some social license. And for a few short and shameful decades, Canada
could profit from climate destruction.

But this alternative scenario seems
increasingly unlikely. In a world evermore worried about climate
catastrophe, Canada is probably going to find it ever harder to expand
the oilsands. As global markets for oil shrink, the highest-cost
highest-carbon oil will be left in the ground first—and that’s our oil.
This will make the current oil down-turn look like a walk in the park.

What's happening in Alberta these days is a canary in the coal mine. And coal mines are on the way out.

Saturday, September 26, 2015

The damage Stephen Harper has done within our borders is apparent everywhere we turn. But Canadians may not be aware of how much damage he has done to their country's international reputation. Harper's tenure on the international stage has been just as destructive as it has been at home. Daryl Copland writes:

The inventor of peacekeeping, long-standing
proponent of North-South relations, and determined promoter of
sustainable development — once universally welcomed as an honest broker,
helpful fixer and provider of good offices and innovative ideas — is
today regarded as an obstruction to progress, a country with little to bring to the table.

Canada’s vaunted foreign service has languished, marginalized and under-employed by a government uninterested in professional diplomatic advice or enlightened international initiative.

Unrecognizable to its former partners and friends, Canada has become something of an international pariah — a serial unachiever,
the fossil of the year, the country that others don’t want in the room.
The one-time boy scout has become a distant outlier in the
international system, sometimes ostracized but more often simply ignored.

Harper claimed we wouldn't recognize Canada by the time he was finished. Our international partners don't recognize us either. When they look at us, what do they see?

All fight, no talk. Dialogue, negotiation,
compromise and knowledge-based problem-solving have given way to
hectoring rhetoric and debilitating retrogression. Diplomacy and
multilateralism have been written off.

Over the past decade the warrior nation
wannabes in Ottawa preferred to preside over disastrous years of war in
Afghanistan, to help open a Pandora’s Box of multiple misfortunes by
participating in an illegal regime change exercise in Libya, and
unthinkingly to join in the anti-ISIL bombing of Iraq and Syria, thus
worsening the refugee crisis and exposing Canadians to a heightened risk
of retaliation at home and abroad.

It's really quite a record. At home and abroad, Mr. Harper has been a one man weapon of mass destruction.

This week, Harper tried to enlist the Terry Fox Foundation in his crusade:

And can anyone believe the transparent, cynical and deplorable attempt
by Steve the Marketer to use Terry Fox as a campaign prop? Harper’s wife
Laureen and Industry Minister James Moore announced that a Harper
government would match Canadian donations up to $35 million for the
annual Terry Fox run.

Moore, who had enough sense not to re-offer (but not enough to keep
his mouth shut), made it up as he went along, declaring that the plan
had the support of the Fox family. Pure Pravda.

God love Terry’s deceased mother, who for decades maintained the
purity of his work by not accepting any private or political
sponsorships. Despite Moore’s hot air, the Fox family made clear that
they had not enthusiastically endorsed the Conservative party’s
attempt to use Terry Fox as electoral bait. In fact, the family never
knew about the matching pledge caper until James and the other Great
One’s Missus dropped the bomb.

But here’s the thing. After the family registered its displeasure
over this classless opportunism, Stephen Harper doggedly insisted that
he was asked to set up the $35 million matching plan. In other words, it
was the family that had it wrong.

Harper has made a career of telling whoppers. But they're catching up with him. This week he claimed that cancelling the F-35 would "crater" the Canadian aerospace industry -- a claim that an official at the Pentagon immediately denied. It was a new twist on the fabrications Harper has told about the flying elephant:

The best the Conservative leader could do was to pass out the same
baloney sandwiches he slapped together years ago. There’s only one
problem. Both the former parliamentary budget officer, Kevin Page, and
current Auditor General Michael Ferguson outed Harper on the real costs
of controversial jet as a matter of public record. This is not staying
on message — this is putting your hand in the blender and expecting a
manicure.

Mr. Harper may claim that Muslim women are trying to hide behind niqabs. The truth is that he is desperately trying to hide behind one.

Thursday, September 24, 2015

Stephen Harper has always treated his political rivals with contempt. But these days, David Krayden writes, he is equally contemptuous of his base. Consider the case of the National Firearms Association:

Leave it to the ‘tough guys’ of Canadian politics to pick fights in all
the wrong places and remind the little people of who’s really calling
the shots. A former party flag-waver has learned that bitter lesson —
which is why Sheldon Clare, president of the National Firearms
Association, is now running as an independent against the Conservative
incumbent in Cariboo-Prince George, B.C.

Clare heads an organization that wields only a fraction of the power
enjoyed by its carnivorous cousin in the U.S., the National Rifle
Association, the bête noire of liberals everywhere. The NRA
routinely tilts the table in Senate and House races south of the border,
while Clare’s group can’t really be called a power-broker.

According to Clare, Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney’s staffers
got into the act as Harper dispatched his personal servant, Kory
Teneycke — fresh from ‘managing’ Sun News into the ground — to hold the
line. (Teneycke’s role in this story is particularly hilarious because,
as the Sun News chief, he never missed an opportunity to insert a gun
story into the daily lineup. He once assigned reporter Alexandra Gunn to
do five live stand-ups about a new salt-firing assault rifle designed to kill flies.)

Clare says he was told not to “be used by the NDP as a stick to beat
up the CPC” and to refrain from criticizing Bill C-51 in the interests
of political solidarity. In return, the NFA says it got a guarantee that
Bill C-42, which addresses firearms licensing, would be amended.

Clare was outraged over the whole affair and went public, claiming that
Teneycke just shrugged and said the group had been “played.” Maybe you
think that kind of “play” is just good clean fun, or bad politics, or
just politics as usual. At any rate, it’s politics as usual for these
Conservatives. Harper doesn’t merely take his core supporters for
granted — he seems to relish every opportunity he gets to rub their
noses in the mud for being naïve enough to believe a political promise.

Then there are all those social conservatives who used to believe that -- like Moses -- Harper would lead them to the Promised Land:

He never had any intention of pursuing their objectives, of course. He
made that clear in 2012, when MPs were debating Conservative backbencher
Stephen Woodworth’s motion to examine whether a child is considered
human at conception or birth. Harper gave his House Whip, Gordon
O’Connor, a barn-burner of a speech to read, belittling the motion and
proclaiming that “abortion cannot be eliminated. It is part of the human
condition.” Debate’s over, social conservatives. Back to your kennel.

And, of course, there is the military:

Somehow the DND funding chart keeps showing the arrow pointing upwards —
but the obsolete equipment isn’t getting replaced. And those who leave
the military — particular those who leave with lingering trauma and
missing limbs — soon find out that all those kind words about service to
country and a nation’s eternal gratitude don’t add up to a real
veteran’s pension any longer. As with gun owners and social
conservatives, the message is the same: Take what we’re offering, shut
up and get back in line. Oh, and remember to vote Conservative.

Wednesday, September 23, 2015

Bruce Carson's trial did not last long. We now await the judge's decision. On one level, the trial was about one individual's corrupt behaviour. But, on another level, the trial revealed yet again how the Harper government corrupts everything it touches. David Keith provides a little context:

In
the spring of 2004, University of Calgary President Harvey Weingarten
recruited me back to Canada to help build a top-notch research centre
that would inform the hard energy choices faced by Alberta, Canada, and
the larger world.
In September 2006, I travelled to Ottawa with
Weingarten to showcase our efforts and help raise funds. We met with
Carson, who was seen as the prime minister’s go-to guy for climate
policy, an increasingly hot topic as the Kyoto accord gained visibility.
My impression of Carson then and in succeeding months was of a gruff
lawyer keen to cut through the spin and craft a middle-ground deal on
climate policy.

Carson was soon appointed to the position of Executive Director of the University of Calgary's School of Energy and the Environment. And it immediately became apparent that Carson was the oil patch's go-to-guy:

It soon became clear that Carson was simply using his academic post to
further the interests of the conservative government and a narrow
segment of the energy industry. Documents released by the RCMP
contain emails and interviews making it unequivocally clear that Carson
worked closely with industry leaders to produce meetings and reports
that had the patina of stakeholder representation, while in fact aiming
to avoid meaningful public debate.

Leaders of Alberta’s universities did nothing
substantive to manage the problem until Carson’s scandal forced their
hands. Even then, they failed to act decisively to ensure that public
money was used for research that supported broad public interests.

Keith's conclusion bears repeating:

This is a national problem. Over decades, Canadian governments have
emasculated or killed institutions that gave independent advice on
science and technology so that they are now among the weakest in the G7.
Federal and provincial governments increasingly demand that research
funding be tied to matching money from industry, so work that threatens
industry’s interests does not get funded. It’s a good idea to tie some
applied work in engineering to industrial interests, but this
requirement must not apply to policy analysis.

Tuesday, September 22, 2015

The Harperites have always lived inside a bunker. During this election, they've fortified the barricades. Lawrence Martin writes:

In the election campaign, the
Conservatives have barred their candidates in a great many ridings from
participating in all-candidates debates. That’s right. The candidates
are censored by the leadership from taking part in the most basic, the
most elementary of democratic functions. The Conservatives dispute that
this is going on but evidence contradicts their half denials.

You
might think Tory candidates with even a pinch of pride would refuse to
put up with this. You’d think they’d tell the leadership that this isn’t
the Canada they grew up in, that this isn’t Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Instead they kowtow.

They choose not to see or hear. Or to know. Anne Kingston recently wrote in Macleans that this government's attempt to destroy information is unprecedented:

It examines the impact of the killing of
the long form census, how hundreds of small towns like Melville, Sask.,
have been turned into statistical dead zones and ghost towns. They are
no longer factored into employment numbers, poverty rates, divorce
rates.

But the report is about more
than that. It tells of the degradation of knowledge across the board in
Stephen Harper’s Ottawa and the threat it poses to a functioning
democracy. It’s about how studies on air pollution and toxic chemicals
containing unwelcome news have vanished. It tells of how credible
information about our history is being supplanted by mythologizing
historical narratives. It’s about how our data collection system with
its emphasis on voluntary surveys is now skewered so that there is less
evidence – how convenient is this for the party in power – of a poverty
problem in this country. It reminds us that we’ll never find out if
there was really a politically-driven crackdown on charities opposed to
government policy. Why? Because the Canada Revenue Agency ordered
employees to destroy all text-message records.

This is a government which has chosen to know nothing. And, it has concluded that the less we citizens know, the better. Of course, when you live inside a bunker, you can't see the end when it's coming.

Monday, September 21, 2015

In last week's debate, when Stephen Harper talked about "old stock" Canadians, he wasn't talking about the oldest stock Canadians -- Canada's native peoples. Consider his record of that file. Michael Harris writes:

It was a telling moment in the debate. It was also perfectly in
keeping with the Harper government’s view of indigenous peoples. They
are invisible, except when beating drums or wearing feathers at one of
those ghastly public ceremonies the Harperites like to substitute for
real action on the injustices facing Aboriginals. Here’s just one
example among many: Shoal Lake #40 – a reserve without safe drinking
water for 17 years and counting.

The Crown-First Nations gathering of January 2012 promised renewal of
the relationship and real engagement between the two parties. A year
later, it was the same old same old. The Governor General didn’t even
bother showing up for the anniversary. And that was a big diss since
David Johnston represents the Crown, and First Nations treaties are with
the Crown — not with any crass politico who fills an office by
representing something less than a majority of Canadians.

Harper talks endlessly. But his words are plug nickels:

It would be hard to imagine a person for whom talk is cheaper than
Stephen Harper. Point of fact: Harper record on Aboriginal issues is
abysmal. Under the Constitution Act of 1982, Section 35 expressly
affirms native treaty rights. In 1995, under the same section, Canada
recognized that First Nations have an inherent right to self-government.

But instead of hitting the reset button, instead of consulting with
First Nations as required by law, and moving towards full implementation
of treaty rights and native self-government, Harper has lowered the
boom on Canada’s natives at every opportunity. He wouldn’t meet Chief
Teresa Spence but he did sic Deloitte on her and publish their audit
during her hunger strike.

First, Harper poisoned the relationship by ramming through omnibus
legislation, Bills C-38 and C-45. Both of them had a profound effect on
native concerns for the environment and sharing in resource
development.

The Harper government also made surreptitious and unilateral changes
to the contribution agreements with Canada’s 630 bands. These
contribution agreements are their primary source of income. Conditions
buried in the appendix to the agreement appeared to suggest the bands
would have to support the government’s omnibus legislation in order to
access their funding.

After setting up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to get to
the bottom of the residential school fiasco, referred to by former prime
minister Paul Martin as “cultural genocide,” the Harper government
refused to hand over documents requested by the commissioners. In the
end, the Commission had to sue the very government that created it in
order to do its job.

Mr. Harper's definition of "Canadians" are people who look and act like him. Put another way, he is a supreme narcissist.

Sunday, September 20, 2015

Stephen Harper doesn't know it. But he's yesterday's man. His policy prescriptions have long since passed their best before date. Tom Walkom writes:

When he came onto the political scene in the late 1980s, Harper was on the cutting edge of what was then the new conservatism.

Like Thatcher, he was determined to shrink government.

In Harper’s view, a properly sized government would get out of the business of funding social programs like medicare.

Its main economic task would be to remove anything, including tariffs and regulations, that interfered with the free market.

He wasn't the first to advocate such policies. Ironically, it was the Liberals before him who advocated smaller, passive government:

Under
Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin, the federal Liberals too adopted the new
orthodoxy of free trade, low taxes and balanced budgets.

In fact, it was the Liberals who, in 1995, obligingly took apart much of the welfare state they had helped create.

The effects were dramatic. In 1995, federal
spending accounted for 22 per cent of Canada’s gross domestic product.
By 2006, it had dropped to 15 per cent.

As spending on social programs like welfare
and employment insurance fell, the Chrétien-Martin Liberals used the
resulting surpluses to lower personal and corporate taxes. That, in
turn, made it politically more difficult to introduce new spending
programs.

But times -- and the problems that accompany them -- have changed:

Put bluntly, the needs of capitalism have changed.

Business remains remarkably productive. But it
cannot translate that productivity into profit unless customers have
the wherewithal to buy its goods and services.

Right now, too many don’t.

The world economy is limping. Europe is in a mess. Japan is stagnant. The U.S. recovery is slow.

The new miracle economies that the world had been counting on, like Brazil, are no longer quite so miraculous.

Even China, with its strange amalgam of communism and cutthroat capitalism, is faltering.

Now the OECD is calling on governments to take up the slack. And former bank economists, like Don Drummond, write that it's time for government to stimulate the economy:

Mainstream fiscal conservatives, such as
former Bank of Canada governor David Dodge, say the government should
fret less about deficits and instead spend on useful infrastructure.

Even the normally tight-fisted International Monetary Fund wants advanced nations to loosen the purse strings.

A paper released this week by the Ottawa-based
Centre for the Study of Living Standards and co-authored by former TD
Bank chief economist Don Drummond concludes that market forces alone
cannot get the economy out of its funk.

Government, the paper says, must play a more
active role, through measures such as investing in public works,
improving access to child care and offering direct grants to promising
businesses.

Mr. Harper's time is up. This election will tell us if Canadians have finally cottoned onto that fact.

Saturday, September 19, 2015

Many watching Thursday's debate were shocked to hear Stephen Harper make a distinction between refugees and those he called "old stock Canadians." If they had been familiar with Harper's history and his Reform roots, they wouldn't have been shocked at all. Murray Dobbins writes:

Not much is written these days about the nature of the Conservative base
post-merger of the old Progressive Conservative Party and the Alliance
Party (formerly Reform). But the base is largely the same today, and in
my book Preston Manning and the Reform Party I documented just
how dangerous the immigration issue was for Manning and his then-policy
chief, Stephen Harper. No other policy issue took up as much time on the
political massage table as this one -- with Manning having to use all
his persuasive powers to neutralize the alarming resolutions coming from
the famous "grass roots" of the party.

Leading up to 1991 policy convention, the most important the Reform
Party ever held, there were 18 riding resolutions on immigration. Every
one of them was considered by the party executive as extreme in one way
or another: imposing various restrictions on immigrants, settlement in
remote regions, demands for "ethnic balance," the deportation of
immigrants with criminal convictions, etc. None of them made it to the
convention floor, replaced by the Party Policy Committee with three more
moderate ones.

From the very beginning, the Reform Party was anti-immigrant:

One way top Reformers played to the anti-immigrant vote was through the
promotion of the writings and speeches of William Gairdner, one of the
party's most popular keynote speakers. In his book, The Trouble with Canada,
Gairdner (in a chapter called "The Silent Destruction of English
Canada...") spoke of "invading cultures" and proposed quotas on
"non-traditional" immigrants (those not from the U.K., U.S., New
Zealand, Britain or white South Africans). Gairdner warned "in 250 years
Canada could become a Chinese nation."

And the National Citizens Coalition, which Harper headed, opposed -- among many other things -- the settlement of Vietnamese refugees:

Among its many well-funded campaigns (against the Canada Health Act,
fair tax reform, unions, and restrictions on corporate political
spending) was a hysterical campaign
against Canada admitting the so-called "boat people" -- the 1978-79
wave of refugees from post-war Vietnam. The NCC took out two full-page
ads in The Globe and Mail warning that the government's policies would
lead to "at least 750,000 [Vietnamese] in the not too distant future."
The actual number was 60,000.

The line from the Globe and Mail sounds suspiciously like Harper's claim that the other two parties would open the door to "hundreds of thousands" of refugees.

Bigotry was always at the heart of the Reform Party. And, even though he tries to hide it, Stephen Harper occasionally reminds us that he never was a Conservative. He was -- and is -- a Reformer.

Friday, September 18, 2015

At several junctures in last night's debate, Justin Trudeau interrupted Stephen Harper with a simple declarative sentence: "That's not true." Mr. Harper's government has distinguished itself with its in-your-face dishonesty. But, Michael Harris writes, it is even more noteworthy for its in-your-face corruption:

Cheating, lying and misleading the House of Commons, elevating the
ethically dubious to high office — these are not good character
references for any party leader. For Harper — who leads a party that
prides itself on its moral values — they could be fatal.

The news this week was full of Tory roadkill. Harper Senate appointee Patrick Brazeau
entered a guilty plea to assault and cocaine charges. A sexual assault
charge was dropped, along with three other criminal charges, but Brazeau
still faces a drunk driving charge and a criminal trial on fraud
charges over his disputed Senate expenses. Despite all of that, he’s
still hoping for an absolute discharge and a return to the Red Chamber.
Not a winner with the base.

Carson was hired by Harper as a key advisor despite having done jail
time for fraud and theft (which Carson disclosed during the vetting
process for his security clearance. He even had cabinet minister John
Duncan’s staff writing ‘media lines’ for him that were essentially aimed
at misleading journalists and the public about Carson’s role in selling
water treatment systems to First Nations reserves. It looked and
smelled a lot like the PMO manipulations in the Mike Duffy case. The
judge has reserved judgment in Carson’s case; he’ll face charges for
illegal lobbying next year.

Harper famously hid in a closet earlier this year. When he came out, Harris writes, he dragged his skeletons with him. And now that they are on full view, his base is not pleased. A recent Abacus poll found:

that Conservative voters are the ones least likely to say
their party’s leader really wants their vote (67 per cent), has values
that line up with their own (46 per cent) and has new ideas about how to
improve the economy (52 per cent.)

Compare that to the Liberal camp, where 85 per cent say Trudeau wants
their vote, 56 per cent believe his values are pretty much the same as
theirs, and 80 per cent say he has new ideas about “how to improve the
country.” Mulcair also enjoys a much stronger level of commitment from
his supporters than Harper, though his numbers were “not quite as strong
as those of Mr. Trudeau,” according to the poll.

Thursday, September 17, 2015

When it comes to evaluating the recently announced federal surplus, it's wise to remember that Stephen Harper has been waging a decade long war on facts. Chris Turner writes:

The crux of the matter is that experts, especially in technical and
scientific fields, are beholden not to short-term policy goals but to
verifiable facts. And Harper’s Conservatives have demonstrated time and
again that they are more than happy to ignore, manipulate, even
eliminate problematic facts to get what they want.

This is one of Harper’s most distinctive and potentially lasting
fingerprints on the country after a decade in power — a dismissive smear
across the government’s fact-finding apparatus that has substantially
diminished its ability to tell Canadians who they are, what’s happening
in their country, and how their government’s policies are affecting
their lives and their world.

The elimination of the long form census and Mr. Harper's omnibus budget bills have destroyed this country's ability to make wise decisions:

Killing the long-form census is perhaps the less comprehensible measure.
It was an act of willful self-blindness in which the Conservatives
deliberately chose to gather much less information — of lower quality —
about what is happening in the country to figure out how to run it. It
only makes any kind of sense in light of Harper’s stated distaste for
those meddling eggheads who “commit sociology” and other sorts of
egregious liberal artistry using the data gathered by the census. If
you’re tired of dodging reports showing that your crime bill won’t
reduce crime and your economic policies don’t improve the economy, why
not simply compromise all the numbers feeding them?

The 2012 omnibus budget bills were a more full-throated articulation of
the anti-expert agenda. They hacked and slashed through
government-funded laboratories and science programs, as well as
rewriting more than 70 separate pieces of legislation in a radical
diminishment of Canada’s environmental stewardship program. The reworked
Fisheries Act now no longer protects more than 80 per cent of the
freshwater species of fish facing extinction it used to cover. The
Navigable Waters Protection Act, which once guarded millions of bodies
of water from reckless development, now applies to less than 200. (The
“Idle No More” movement among Canada’s First Nations began as a direct
response to the enormous reduction in protection of indigenous rights
this represented.)

Harper rose to power on the backs of the ignorant and the disaffected. His aim is to ensure that all citizens stay that way. As long as they don't have "just the facts, ma'am," he can always skate past the finish line.

Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Stephen Harper began the week by crowing about his surplus. He fancies himself a magician; and so, nothing he says or does is ever what it seems. And such is the case with the "surplus." Jim Stanford writes:

The Conservative government has been criticized (including by the Parliamentary Budget Office)
for its routine practice of underspending Parliament-approved budgets
in many departments, and approved but unspent allocations were a
significant factor in this week's announced surplus. Lapsed funds
totaled $8.7 billion in fiscal 2014-15, higher than expected in the
budget, and continuing a trend of higher-than-normal lapses. The short
financial summary from Finance Canada does not provide details on which
departments accounted for the biggest amounts of lapsed funds. In the
past, substantial lapsed funds were booked in departments such
as including veterans' affairs, youth job-creation, and security. We
won't know until the release of detailed public accounts how much was
underspent in each area.

Another factor which can affect a small balance (up or down) is the
timing of various revenues and expenses, and the treatment of accounting
issues like depreciation of public capital. Here, too, we do not have
enough information from this summary report to know if timing decisions
affected the balance one way or the other. We should note that the
government's net debt rose by $4.7 billion during the year, and it had a
net financial requirement (to fund operations) of $2.7 billion. In
other words, the government was still borrowing money, even though it
declared a (paper) surplus. This difference can arise because of
accounting treatment of fixed assets, etc., which reduce the apparent
deficit even though the government still needs to borrow. The
directional gap between a positive surplus and continued cash borrowing,
suggests that these timing issues were likely important to the
achievement of the "official" surplus -- but again we won't be able to
tell for sure until the full public accounts are released.

What is particularly interesting is how surplus EI funds have been used to plug holes:

We can be sure, however, that surplus funds siphoned from the Employment
Insurance system account for more than the entire $1.9-billion surplus
for the federal budget as a whole. EI revenues exceeded EI expenses by
$4.5 billion for 2014-15, according to the Finance Canada summary. That
means that for every $1 in bottom-line surplus declared by the
government, $2.38 was reallocated away from the EI system. The EI
surplus arises because benefit eligibility has been tightened so
aggressively, and most unemployed Canadians can no longer qualify for
benefits. (At present, under 40 per cent of officially unemployed
Canadians qualify for regular EI benefits.) Yet Canadian workers (and
their employers) still pay into the system. The resulting surplus
becomes a convenient slush fund for subsidizing other government fiscal
priorities -- in this case, declaring victory over the deficit in the
middle of an election. Without this transfer from the EI program, the
federal government (excluding EI) would have recorded a $2.6-billion
deficit (approximately equal to what the government originally predicted
for the year).

Strange, isn't it? We are officially in recession, yet the government declares a surplus. Which raises the question, "Who does the economy work for?" Something doesn't compute.

Tuesday, September 15, 2015

Stephen Harper doesn't talk about his evangelical religion. But its footprints are all over his policies. Andrew Nikiforuk writes in the Tyee:

Most Canadians still don't even know that Harper has been a long-time member of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, an evangelical church established by a Canadian nearly 100 years ago. It has a wide following in Alberta.

Harper's church believes
that Jesus Christ will return to Earth in an apocalypse that is
"imminent." It does not support abortion and homosexuality and believes
that those who aren't born-again are "lost."

The publication Christianity Today has called Harper "The Smartest Evangelical Politician You Never Heard Of." But take a look at his policies and his legislation and you'll see what drives him. Consider his policy on Israel:

The Israeli press understands Canada's new religious reality. During
Harper's celebrated state visit to Israel in 2014 the local press
published an analysis
noting that views of "the devout evangelical Christian prime minister"
probably played a key role in Canada's new strategic union with the
right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu.

Under Netanyahu, anti-Arab harassment and
hatefulness have reached dangerous heights. Even the conservative
Israeli president Ruvi Rivlin has despaired about the racism, extremism and "thuggishness that has permeated the national dialogue" in Israel.

But that's not what Canadians now hear from their evangelical prime minister. His government has declared
a "zero tolerance" approach towards groups that support boycotting
Israel to protest its dealings with Palestinians, conflating criticism
of state policies with "anti-Semitism." That meant the Canadian
government has identified as enemies such boycott backers as the United
Church of Canada, Canadian Quakers, labour and student groups.

It's not just Harper's policy towards Israel that shows the influence of Evangelicalism. Domestic policy is full of it:

Religion explains why Harper appointed a creationist, Gary Goodyear,
as science minister in 2009; why the party employs Arthur Hamilton, as
its hard-nosed lawyer (he's an evangelical too and a member of the
Christian and Missionary Alliance); why Conservative MP Wai Young would
defend the government's highly controversial spying legislation, Bill
C-51, by saying it reflects the teachings of Jesus; and why Canada's new
relationship with Israel dominates what's left of the country's
shredded foreign policy.

It also explains why Harper would abolish
the role of science advisor in the federal government only to open an
Office of Religious Freedom under the department of Foreign Affairs with
an annual $5-million budget. Why? Because millions of suburban white
evangelical Christians consider religious freedom a more vital issue than same-sex marriage or climate change.

Like the Puritans of Salem, Harper believes that if he can't convert you, he should destroy you. Those who see themselves as God's agents are a clear and present danger.

Monday, September 14, 2015

Like the other lies crafted in the PMO, the Harperites are trying to sell the idea that they are tough on crime. As part of their campaign, they have gone after NDP candidate Carol Baird Ellan in British Columbia. Michael Harris writes:

Consider the case of Carol Baird Ellan. The Conservative Party
attack-machine is going after the ex-judge turned NDP candidate in
Burnaby North Seymour for being soft on crime. The Cons have an entire website devoted to examples of Baird Ellan handing out what they describe as “lenient” sentences to serious criminals, including sex offenders.

When you compare judges records with Mr. Harper's record, you discover undisguised contempt for courts and judges:

Unless the Conservatives are saying that Baird Ellan misconstrued the
law, their complaint is not against the judge at all. It is against the
statutes under which she made her sentencing decisions. If Harper thinks
the laws under which she exercised discretion are flawed, why didn’t he
pass new statutes to force judges to send sex offenders to jail and
throw away the key?

Last April, the SCC struck down the Harper government’s law that set a
mandatory-minimum sentence of three years for gun crimes on a first
offence, and five years on subsequent convictions. The 6-3 ruling
written by Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin found that among many other
defects, mandatory minimum sentences threaten the principle of
proportionality in sentencing. Or as the Chief Justice herself put it,
“They function as a blunt instrument that may deprive courts of the
ability to tailor proportionate sentences at the lower end of a
sentencing range.”

But consider a long list of Harper's appointments. Bruce Carson's trial starts today:

This week in Ottawa, Carson’s criminal trial for influence peddling
begins. The charge relates to the accusation that Carson used his
influence as a former government official to try to sell water
filtration systems to native reserves, and that he directed 20 per cent
of the revenue from the deals to his then fiancee, Michele McPherson. McPherson is a former escort who worked in the Ottawa sex-trade.

Carson also faces three other charges of illegal lobbying which will be tried in court next year.

For the Conservatives, the connection between Harper and Carson is
not the best example of their being tough on crime. Carson was Harper’s
research and policy director in the opposition years, and joined the PMO
staff as a senior adviser after Harper won the 2006 election.

The thing is, before joining the PMO, Carson already had two criminal
convictions — one for theft in 1983 and another for fraud in 1990. He
had been sentenced to 18 months in jail on the theft conviction. He was
also disbarred by the Law Society of Upper Canada.

Here’s the kicker: Carson’s lawyer, Patrick McCann, said his client
fully disclosed his criminal past during his security clearance check
BEFORE starting work at the PMO. So, despite knowing about his record,
this tough-on-crime prime minister hired him anyway.

Then, of course, there was the late Arthur Porter and that righteous defender of family values, Vic Toews -- Harper's former Minister of Justice -- who was appointed to the bench in Manitoba.

Sunday, September 13, 2015

Last week, Stephen Harper pulled an Australian rabbit out of his hat. Up until now, he's been a pretty successful magician. He's created diversions to distract his audience from what he's really doing. The diversions are called wedge issues. But his show has been on the road for a long time; and it's getting stale. History shows that, when the show gets stale, Canadian voters shut it down. Jeffrey Simpson writes:

What does the historical stroll reveal?
That Canadians do not have formal term limits for the leaders, as do
Americans, Mexicans and the French for their presidents, but somewhere
in the eighth or ninth year of a prime minister’s tenure, the public
says “time’s up.” Call it, for lack of a more precise phrase, the
“democratic instinct.”

It doesn’t much
matter which party is in power. The state of the economy is not of
cardinal importance. How much money a party throws around before and
during a campaign doesn’t count for much. None of these, and other
factors, seem as critical as the democratic instinct that it’s “time for
a change.”

From Louis St. Laurent to Jean Chretien, ten years is about as long as a prime minister gets. Louis St. Laurent got eight years. John Diefenbaker got six. Mike Pearson got five. Pierre Trudeau got eleven, but he was really finished after nine. Joe Clark got nine months.

When Stephen Harper dreamed of establishing a dynasty, he was spitting into the wind:

If he wins this election with another
majority, he would remain in office for more consecutive years than any
postwar prime minister. Even if Mr. Harper managed for a couple of years
with a minority, he would still win the longevity award. Alas, for him,
the electorate is not going to give him a majority. It increasingly
looks like even a Conservative minority is doubtful.

Opinion
polls can, and will, change. Take them for what they are worth;
snapshots of a point in time. Today, the serious ones all point in the
same direction: The Conservatives are at or below 30 per cent.

The trouble with spitting into the wind is that your own saliva comes back and hits you in the face.

Saturday, September 12, 2015

Chris Alexander is only the latest Harper attack dog to be sent back to his kennel. Rick Salutin writes that there have been many of them:

The parade of Tory attack dogs has been long and luminous. It's how
John Baird and Jason Kenney got their Ottawa start, fangs ever-bared.
You thought it came naturally to them but as they moved up, they grew
less vicious and slid out of the role while others arrived: Joe Oliver,
implying environmentalists are terrorists, yet never quite at ease in
the part; Julian Fantino, snubbing wounded vets, more comfortably. Dean
Del Mastro. Peter Kent, formerly a smooth TV journalist who went
straight for the jugular as a minister (he provoked an early, endearing
Justin Trudeau obscenity in the House) yet was dumped anyway: did Harper
simply not trust the type? Kent was still at it this week, falsely
slagging a Syrian "terrorist," then half-heartedly apologizing.

Paul Calandra is an interesting case. He seemed a born potty-mouth.
You could picture him during recess in the schoolyard. Then one question
period he overreached, yammering irrelevantly about Thomas Mulcair
supporting genocide against Israel as if he couldn't shut it off. Next
day he was back tearfully apologizing and hasn't been the same meanie
since. He still shows up on TV but without the old bile. Maintaining
high rabidity levels isn't that easy for most people. (There are
exceptions: Pierre Poilievre.) These guys were recruited to play a role
and you don't say No to the boss.

Joining the Harper fraternity requires that aspiring rush candidates go through a nasty initiation ceremony. Ultimately, the price of admission is that you sell your soul. There have been some who, when they saw what was going on, left the fraternity house. People like Garth Turner, Bill Casey and Brent Rathgeber. But most young fools wanted a fraternity sweatshirt -- with a big H on it.

And how did Stephen “He’s Not Perfect” Harper react? By insisting the Conservative Party of Canada runs only the best
candidates. Given the exploits of Jerry “The Urinator” Bance, Ryan “The
Enforcer” Leef and “Sgt.” Sue MacDonell, it was an odd thing for him to
say.

The facts are simply catching up with Mr. Harper. And facts are what he has worked so hard to bury:

Confabulation has always been Harper’s reflex response whenever he
doesn’t like what the facts have on offer. And so — with the economy in
recession, unemployment on the rise, the oil patch in a shambles and the
dollar at 75 cents — Harper says the economic news is good … that it proves his plan is working.
Still, Steve insists he balanced the budget this time. Fiddling with
the math and balancing the budget are not the same things, but it hardly
matters. The man isn’t listening.

Steve also didn’t believe in the long form census. To him, facts are
just another form of opposition. He didn’t believe at first that there
was a recession in 2008. He didn’t think it mattered that he was found
in contempt of Parliament. (It mattered. The man who found him in
contempt, former speaker Peter Milliken, thinks he still is in
contempt.) Steve didn’t think there was anything wrong with making an
unconstitutional appointment to the Supreme Court of Canada. Put a girl
in ermine and she gets uppity — it was all Beverley McLachlin’s fault,
we were told.

Andrew Coyne writes that the Harper campaign is going nowhere. Even the inestimable Margaret Wente writes that Harper is toast. Others -- like John Baird, Peter Mackay and James Moore -- faced the facts before the election. Now it's Harper's turn.

Sunday, September 06, 2015

Successful politicians know how to listen, to respond respectfully and
through that dialogue, learn. Some Canadian politicians’ increasing
fascination with steely message discipline at the expense of listening
or respectful response is dangerous for democratic dialogue — and,
often, for their own careers.

Dialogue is not in Stephen Harper's skill set. And everyone who works for him follows a strict code. Like the prime minister, they memorize answers from the Harperian catechism and repeat them ad nauseam. You would think that a political animal like Mr. Harper would understand this simple axiom:

Successful political dialogue requires listening and empathy. When a
constituent tells you of their grief, their dreams or their anger you
may not respond with rote defensive talking points.

In the end, the Harperian formula leads to self destruction:

There is no excuse for the appalling response
that Alexander offered CBC’s new election star Rosemary Barton. Nor for
his surly defensive nonsense about the government’s record on refugees.
His scowling adolescent attack on the media for its failure to give the
story adequate attention would have been laughable if it were not so
appalling. Especially in the face of the mounting human tragedy and the
Canadian — and international — failure to respond adequately to it.

His return the next night, after being
summoned to Ottawa by his masters, clearly put through hours of message
training “refreshment” was less disastrous in performance but more
damaging in substance. He told a series of whoppers that will now be
fact-checked and return to bite him and the government.

The media are finally beginning to examine the numbers -- behind the budget, behind employment statistics, behind the refugee crisis. And, increasingly, Canadians are appalled. You can only spin a web of lies for so long until they catch up with you.

They've caught up with Chris Alexander. They'll soon catch up with Stephen Harper.

Saturday, September 05, 2015

We're officially in a recession. And, next month, we may be officially out of it. But that doesn't mean, Jim Stanford writes, that the Canadian economy is in good shape. In three specific areas, the economy has been limping along for years:

Investment: For years Canada relied on energy
megaprojects to lead business investment. But that engine is now
sputtering badly, for the foreseeable future. Expensive corporate tax
cuts didn't produce any measurable uptick in investment. We need new
strategies to elicit badly needed capital spending -- both private and
public.

Exports: This government's trade strategy consists
almost exclusively of signing lots of free trade deals. They've inked
six, and are negotiating several more (including the Trans-Pacific
Partnership, which might be concluded before Canadians go to the
polls). Yet Canada's actual exports hardly grew at all under
Conservative rule -- by far the worst record in post-war history. It
turns out that producing valuable goods and services that foreigners
actually want to buy, is a lot more complicated than signing trade deals
and waving them about.

Productivity: Free markets and low taxes are
supposed to automatically spur efficiency. But Canada's measured
productivity performance has been abysmal: growing less than 1 per cent
per year, badly lagging previous governments and most of our trading
partners. Upgrading, innovation, and investment are the prerequisites
for productivity -- yet we've gone backward in every area.

Mr. Harper's policy prescriptions have done nothing to improve any of these three economic measures. In fact, they have made each measure worse. For nearly ten years, his "steady hand" at the helm have left the economy gasping for air.

Friday, September 04, 2015

Stephen Harper works hard to control people. But he can't control events. And events are catching up with him. At the beginning of the week, events caught up with his economic policy. And, two days ago, events caught up with his immigration policy.

The picture of little Aylan Kurdi's lifeless body speaks volumes and shouts out the message that Canada's immigration policy -- like so much else that Mr. Harper does -- is morally bankrupt. Michael Harris writes:

They’re taking to calling refugees ‘migrants’ these days. I worry about
that. But by any other name that photo — that motionless little body —
would have rocked the world. What are we becoming?

This was the same pack of philanthropists who didn’t want to extend
medical coverage to refugees in Canada, forcing Canadian doctors to
demonstrate in front of Parliament.

Alexander is supposed to be among our best and brightest. Instead, he proves the wisdom behind Mark Twain's admonition: "It's better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than open it and remove all doubt."

That's what happens to people who immerse themselves in a culture of willful ignorance. Their brains atrophy. And little children die.

Thursday, September 03, 2015

The outcome of this election is uncertain. But regardless of who wins, Andrew Coyne writes, what happens after October 19th is also uncertain:

So it’s an unusually unpredictable election. But that doesn’t begin
to describe how uncertain the outcome is. Because it isn’t just the
results on election night that are impossible to predict: it’s what
happens after. Even if the polls as they now stand turn out to be an
exact reflection of each party’s share of the vote on Oct. 19, that
still doesn’t give us the first clue who will be governing us.

For one thing, it is always difficult to know how precisely the polls
will translate into seats. But suppose the current projections are
right: that the NDP wins about 125 seats, to the Conservatives’ 120 and
the Liberals’ 95. What then?

In a properly functioning democracy, the Conservatives could try to form a government:

Among the imponderables: who does the governor general call upon to form
a government? The answer is not, as popularly believed, the party with
the most seats. Rather, by convention it is supposed to be the incumbent
who gets first crack. Probably that is what would happen, and probably
Stephen Harper would accept. But what if the gap in seats between the
NDP and the Conservatives were larger? Would he try to form a government
with, say, 110 seats? 105?

And, what if Harper -- like Joe Clark -- refused to call back the House for five months? Or what if the Governor General called on someone else to form a government and -- like Mackenzie King -- Harper refused to accept Donald Johnston's decision? This is a man who believes that all decisions rest with him and him alone.

My bet is that a prime minister who has kept two dozen orders in council secret would not go quietly or easily. However, if the Conservatives were reduced to third party status, much of the uncertainty would be cast in the dustbin.

Certainly, Canada’s January to July recession does underline the fundamental flaws in Harper’s approach to the economy.

He assumed the Chinese-led resource boom would continue unabated and that the price of oil would never collapse.

He assumed that all government need do is cut
taxes, encourage pipelines, sign free trade deals and do its best to
keep wages down for business.

He assumed that if troubles arose, the invisible hand of the free market would sort everything out.

Harper claimed that it was his firm grip on
the tiller that steered Canada through heavy waters. In fact it was the
price of oil.

Harper's policy has been repeated throughout Canadian history. Historian Harold Innis called it the "resource trap."

Unfortunately, Walkom writes, so far neither Tom Mulcair or Justin Trudeau have said much about what they would do differently.
Now is the time to think outside the box we've been in for the last twenty years.

Tuesday, September 01, 2015

In the 1980's, America's economy began to rust out. Ronald Reagan told the unemployed in cities like Detroit, Baltimore and Garry, Indiana that they should move out of town and seek work in one of the burgeoning McDonald's franchises. Michael Moore chronicled the fate of the newly unemployed in his film, Roger and Me. The plight of those left behind was illustrated most pathetically by a woman whose hand painted sign advertised that she sold rabbits "For Pets or Meat."

In the second decade of the new century, the Economist reports that Canada has developed its own rust belt:

IF YOU visit south-western Ontario and the Niagara peninsula you will
see scenes of industrial decay. Steel mills, vehicle-parts factories and
food processors sit abandoned, their car parks studded with tufts of
grass. The region has the look of a rustbelt, and that has Canadians
worried.

Manufacturing took a beating in the late 2000s and early 2010s, when
high oil prices drove up the value of the Canadian dollar, making
factories less competitive. But Canada should now be recovering from
that bout of Dutch disease. The “loonie”, as Canadians call their
currency, has been dropping along with oil prices. On August 25th it
fell to its lowest level in a decade against the American dollar. That,
plus the strong economy in the United States, the market for
three-quarters of Canada’s exports, should have scraped off much of the
rust.

So far it has not. Factory sales rose 1.2% in June, but were 3.1% below
their level of a year earlier. The failure of manufacturing to respond
to the tonic of a weaker currency is one reason why the economy probably
contracted during the first half of 2015.

Now Canadians are starting to suspect that much of what they lost may
never come back. In 2000 manufacturing accounted for 18% of GDP, not
much lower than the share in Germany; by 2013 that had dropped to 10%,
about the level in Britain and the United States. Factory employment has
fallen by about 500,000 since 2005, to 1.7m. In the decade to 2012,
some 20,000 factories shut down.

History is repeating itself. Neoliberalism doesn't die. It just finds new places to take root, peddled by new snake oil salesmen. Reagan claimed that it was "Morning In America." Stephen Harper claims that the sun is rising on a brave new world.

About Me

A retired English teacher, I now write about public policy and, occasionally, personal experience. I leave it to the reader to determine if I practice what I preached to my students for thirty-two years.